OK, so this post should probably have come at the beginning, rather than slinking along now, after three posts have already gone up...

Never mind.

My original blog, Travel and Food (which covered the period from January 2010 to the first few hopeful hours of January 2019), was eclectic to say the least.

Everything went in there.

I defended this practice in my 500th Travel and Food post, back in December 2016:

"I'm pretty broad in what I see as 'travel and food'. As far as I'm concerned, books, performances, movies, art, spiritual experiences, and language-learning constitute travel for the mind and food for the soul. So they figure in a number of posts as well."

But I always felt this catch-all approach was slightly unprofessional, and when we started Purple Tern, I decided to be a bit more disciplined.

So Purple Tern specifically charts the unfolding story of our Big OE, and the substory of our attempts to set up home in Sarawak.

The Velvet Cushion, on the other hand, is about inner travel. As the byline says, it's about reading, looking, hearing, and searching.



All posts show up on the NilAligned home page.

If you just want to follow the OE experiences, without any of this books-and-art stuff, then stick with Purple Tern.

Purple Tern will be updated very regularly, as we travel; The Velvet Cushion, where the posts are less time-sensitive, will be a bit more sporadic.

And why "Velvet Cushion"? Mostly what you get is velveteen, I suppose, strictly speaking, rather than velvet -- but from the seats in concert halls and cinemas to the benches in galleries and the kneelers in churches, the activities of "reading, looking, hearing, and searching" are often carried out from the vantage point of something soft and yielding.

Well, it made sense to me anyway...